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Tech billionaire Elon Musk is attempting to interfere with Germany’s upcoming national election in February, a government spokesperson said Monday.
“It is indeed the case that Elon Musk is trying to influence the federal election,” a government spokesperson told reporters. While Musk was free to express his opinions, “freedom of opinion also covers the greatest nonsense,” she added.
The German government will stay on Musk’s platform X for the time being, she said.
The warning comes a day after the Tesla CEO doubled down on his support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in an opinion piece in the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag.
He argued that the AfD was the “last spark of hope” for the country. While the conservative Christian Democratic Union is leading the polls with 30 percent, the far-right AfD is in second place with 19 percent, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls.
Musk’s comments caused major political backlash.
“Elon Musk is attempting nothing less than Vladimir Putin,” Lars Klingbeil, the leader of the ruling Social Democrats, said to German publisher Funke Mediengruppe. Both Putin and Musk want to see anti-democratic forces succeed in the elections, causing Germany to be “plunged into chaos,” he added.
The tech titan’s goal is to increase his wealth, another Social Democrat politician, Saskia Esken, said Monday. “He wants to become even richer. And everything he does, he does with precisely this goal in mind.”
Friedrich Merz, the lead candidate for the conservative Christian Democrats, criticized Musk’s comments as “intrusive and presumptuous.”
He warned that the AfD’s anti-EU stance and their proposed exit from the European Union — which has been dubbed “Dexit” — would ruin the German economy.
Musk should not forget, that “it was the AfD that voiced the strongest opposition to” building his Tesla factory in Germany, he added. The tech tycoon opened the company’s first European gigafactory in the German state of Brandenburg in 2022.
Musk has not responded to the backlash. But he reposted a photo from the AfD’s chancellor candidate, Alice Weidel, who used Musk’s opinion piece for her party’s election campaign, and has previously called for Chancellor Olaf Scholz to resign.
He has recently supported several European populist, right-wing politicians, such as Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
